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Tumblr site corrects graffiti language flubs

Every weekday, PR Daily associate editor Alan Pearcy highlights the day’s most compelling stories and amusing marginalia on the Web in this, #TheDailySpin.

Step aside, Guardian Angles, there’s a new squad of patrollers. While these brave citizens don’t sport those fancy red berets of yours, they are patrolling urban streets—for crimes against punctuation. Sure, they more closely resemble street cleaners, but let’s not get hung up on semantics.

The Tutor Crowd, an online tutoring site, launched a Tumblr dedicated to ridding the sides of London’s buildings, bridges, and railway cars of graffiti artists’ poor grammar and spelling—because nothing carries more street cred than using proper English. Describing its mission for the Tumblr, the company says:

“English tuition doesn't have to be stuffy, boring and expensive. At The Tutor Crowd we're taking the classroom to the streets, correcting London's graffiti to spread our message.”

Meanwhile, some speakers appear to be misusing the TED brand. The conference company, which essentially franchised itself by allowing people to organize local gatherings under the banner of Tedx, is drawing flak from science geeks for a 2010 Tedx talk. According to the Harvard Business Review, the company’s new policy of letting more people host conferences has its benefits, but TED “no longer completely controls its content or its brand.”

Content control is something Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is also having troubles with. Recently, he asked the site’s users to curb their blatant sexism toward its female audience. Unfortunately, as The Atlantic Wire reports, posters to Reddit haven’t taken kindly to Ohanian’s request, even going as far as to call into question his stance on free speech.

Newspapers, too, are faced with a dilemma about the content. According to The Daily Beast, readers having soured on print media because of the industry’s political slant in its stories. Megan Ardle writes:

“… the future of journalism is more opinionated, less ‘objective.’ I don't think that this is an entirely bad thing; partisan and ideological media has strengths as well as weaknesses. But it will be a wrenching shift for those of us used to making our living on the old model.”

I can’t find any political slant in the coverage of South By Southwest standout “Grumpy Cat.” Perhaps this group of youngsters might know. The Fine Brothers rounded them up for another stirring installment of kids reacting to popular online memes: (via Laughing Squid)

Children focus groups seem to be the key to a recent branding strategy for AT&T. According to Creativity, the mobile provider’s “It’s Not Complicated” campaign has found success in a series of “guided’ improv” spots featuring kids, which includes a series of basketball-themed commercials airing for March Madness:

At a Chili’s restaurant in Utah, it was one child in particular that first captivated its staff, and now, the Internet. Reports ABC News, the touching story of Arianna Hill, a seven-year-old with autism, has gone viral after her older sister posted a photo on Facebook of the young child kissing her cheeseburger. The sandwich was a replacement brought by the siblings’ compassionate waitress to substitute for the “broken” (cut in half) one that had originally been served to Arianna before she communicated that she needed one that was “fixed.”

With no mention of my Twitter handle again, what’s fixed is Time’s listing of the 140 best feeds on the social media site in 2013. See who did make the list here.

Is there something you think we should include in our next edition of #TheDailySpin? Tweet me @iquotesometimes with your suggestions. Thanks in advance.